After completing the Viral Content Challenge, I realized making something go viral isn’t easy. And sometimes, there’s no way of knowing what will and won’t blow up. You must strike the perfect cord eliciting emotion with the right timing getting people to share content. I did not achieve the success like some of my classmates, but it was a valuable learning experience. Below is the meme that I shared but it never quite got the exposure I was looking for.
Objectives:
As laid out when the challenge began, I was hoping for 500 views on the meme. I didn’t come anywhere close to that. I wanted to dive into a digital conversation about the frustrations when someone that a person is interested in dating is already in a committed relationship. While 123 people viewed my meme, ultimately it wasn’t as many as I would have wanted.
What worked:
Very little worked in this campaign. A couple people commented on the imgur meme, but most of the action related to that was within the first few minutes of posting the meme. At first, I thought there was a chance that it could garner attention as every time I pressed refresh the views kept going up. The immediate satisfaction of seeing more and more people view it was almost euphoric.
What didn’t work:
Basically everything else. When I scheduled tweets, I got very little action on Twitter. Bumping the imgur link back to the top of my followers’ timeline didn’t help. I waited to promote my last Tweet because I thought I’d want a boost at the end rather than at the beginning. But even my Tweet that I promoted only got two likes and no retweets. That was a red flag for me. If I’m spending money to promote a Tweet, I ‘d hope that the promotion would generate more shares. The problem was that never happened.
Below is the Tweet that I promoted.
Nothing to do since your crush already has a boyfriend? You’re not alone. #NHsmc https://t.co/dzPV8zjg78
— Paul Schwedelson (@paulschwedelson) April 8, 2017
Final imgur views: 123
Twitter promotion:
Conclusion:
All in all, I’m disappointed with how this project went. I’m unsure what I would do differently if I could do it again, but I would definitely change things up. While I was unsuccessful, I learned a lot about what it takes to get a meme to go viral.
There’s definitely no sure fire way to get anything to go viral. You just have to combine as many of the keys to virality as possible and hope. Oftentimes, the difference between something going viral and not is if it’s noticed and picked up by a “gatekeeper” or social media influencer.
It could’ve helped to crop your Twitter card so that “When you find out” part of the text was still in the photo and made it a little more intriguing and clickable.
I found that my viral content challenge went similarly to yours. Its so difficult to figure out what the people of the interwebs want to see at any particular moment in time. It would be interesting to try this project 5 times, just to see how much you learn from each try.